I recently needed to move a few directorys of tens- or hundreds-of-thousands of files to my Synology. Perfect use for rsync!

Unfortunately, rsync on OS X is stuck at 2.6.9, and I wanted to take advantage of some of the new features of 3.1.0. Specifically better handling of OS X metadata, and progress indication.

Fortunately, this walks you through a quick build and installation of rsync 3.1.0 in your /usr/local/bin folder. The benefit is that you can install your new version alongside the OS X included version (which is installed in /usr/bin/). Then you can add a couple aliases to your .bash_profile to treat them appropriately.

The first makes the system-installed 2.6.9 version refrencable by using the command oldrsync. The second makes the version in /usr/local/bin/ (which is 3.1.0, in my case) the one that runs when I type rsync. Finally, the third references the new version of rsync with a couple flags I almost always use.

There's been quite a lot of hype about this. I can't wait to get my hands on the game. The Campo Santo team has put together an incredible looking game, and knowing Panic's attention to detail, this is going to be a blast.

To recap: durability, pretty deep balls AND timely pass-interference penalties! You wouldn’t call it the sexiest quarterback package, and you certainly wouldn’t feel great about paying one of the league’s most lucrative ransoms for it. […]

Then again, the Ravens weren’t paying for Joe Flaccid. They were paying for Joe Flacco. You know, the calm dude from the playoffs. The towering, smiling, handsome, lanky, confident, gunslinging, teaser-killing, flag-generating, deep-ball-flinging machine. This version of Flacco suffered growing pains: seven straight road playoff battles; in the first five, he had no 200-yard games, one touchdown and six picks, three wins and two losses, and two season-ending stink bombs against the 2008-09 Steelers (three picks) and 2009-10 Colts (two picks, three points total). He looked better in his third postseason appearance (two more road games, including a blowout win in K.C.), then blossomed the following winter when deep threat Torrey Smith showed up. Flacco’s seven-game playoff stretch from January 2012 through last weekend kinda sorta maybe backs up John Harbaugh’s claim that Flacco is “the best quarterback in football.”

Lou Montulli in an old (but it seems to be impossible to find out how old) post on what appears to be a kind of personal website:

At some point in the evening I mentioned that it was sad that Lynx was not going to be able to display many of the HTML extensions that we were proposing, I also pointed out that the only text style that Lynx could exploit given its environment was blinking text. We had a pretty good laugh at the thought of blinking text, and talked about blinking this and that and how absurd the whole thing would be. The evening progressed pretty normally from there, with a fair amount more drinking and me meeting the girl who would later become my first wife.

Shocker.

It seems pretty sad that someone so involved with developing the web as we know it has this for a website.

The only bad thing about Song Exploder is that I've spent a lot more money on music I otherwise might not have found. Woe is me.

Be sure not to miss the year-end episode Sea of Love by the National. You can go through the year-long archives and find plenty of gold. The access that Hrishikesh Hirway has been able to gain over 52 weeks is a great example of how thoughtful, interesting, and insightful commentary opens doors.

This is the perfect pre-Halloween podcast. Grisly deaths; heroic figures, people who attempt to rise to "hero" status, but make themselves look like fools; supposedly supernatural monsters; all in late 18th century France.

And, the best part? After you listen, you can watch Brotherhood of the Wolf with a fire and a glass of wine. That's exactly how I'd like to lead into Halloween.

An extraordinarily clear and understandable post by Chris Coyne that explains exactly what's wrong with the idea that by protecting our data, Apple (and Google, and other service providers) are only serving to protect the guilty. In fact, they're protecting us all, and in many ways.

Beyond all the technical considerations, there is a sea change in what we are digitizing.

We whisper “I love you” through the cloud. We have pictures of our kids in the bath tub. Our teens are sexting. We fight with our friends. We talk shit about the government. We embarrass ourselves. We watch our babies on cloud cameras. We take pictures of our funny moles. We ask Google things we might not even ask our doctor.

Even our passing thoughts and fears are going onto our devices.

Time was, all these things we said in passing were ephemeral. We could conveniently pretend to forget. Or actually forget. Thanks to the way our lives have changed, we no longer have that option.

This phenomenon is accelerating. In 10 years, our glasses may see what we see, hear what we hear. Our watches and implants and security systems of tomorrow may know when we have fevers, when we're stressed out, when our hearts are pounding, when we have sex and - wow - who's in the room with us, and who's on top and what direction they're facing*. Google and Apple and their successors will host all this data.

We're not talking about documents anymore: we're talking about everything.

You should be allowed to forget some of it. And to protect it from all the dangers mentioned above.

As I increasingly use my various devices as an outboard brain (which I do, a lot), I need things to be ephermal. I need to be able to tell my outboard brain to forget stuff with only slightly more difficulty than my real brain forgets stuff. And I want to know that eg the NSA isn't creeping on stuff I've already forgotten.

The Verge sent photographer Austin Mann to some amazing locations and into some incredible experiences to test the cameras on the new iPhones. I'm jealous of the experience, but I'm also amazed at how the cameras in these ever-thinner devices keeps improving.

Will anyone be trading in their Lange Double-Split for an Apple Watch? Certainly not. But, will the average Lange owner buy an Apple Watch, wear it on the weekends, and then, after a great workout with it, decide to leave it on next for a vacation to the beach, and then maybe on casual Friday to the office? It's possible. Apple products have a way of making someone not want to live without them, and while I wasn't able to fully immerse myself in the OS yesterday, what I saw was impressive. So while certainly not direct competition for haute horology watchmaking right now, the Apple Watch is absolutely competition for the real estate of the wrist, and years down the road, it could spell trouble for traditional watches even at a high level. When you realize you just don't need something anymore, there is little desire to buy another.

This is basically how I'm thinking about the Apple Watch. It's another watch to add to my (small) collection of mostly inexpensive but nice looking watches. I may find that I love the features it brings with it, and I may wind up wearing it a lot.

Sized to be accurate when printed at 100%. If you or someone you know is debating about which phone to order, this is a great way to get a feel without waiting for the phones to show up in the Apple stores.

Craig Hockenberry put together a really good list of Terminal tips and tricks useful for developers. Many of these require only a little thought to be useful for network engineers, as well. Being able to do stuff like this is a big part of why I've always been a fan of using Terminal directly, in OS X, to ssh to remote devices, as opposed to using a GUI like SecureCRT.

An interesting, and especially well told, report of a murder, the trusted physician behind the murder, and the doctor who took over his practice. I was about to unsubscribe from This American Life, but this one pulled me back in.

This episode is a few weeks old, but I don't think the information or view points go stale. There were outbursts of surprise when it Facebook published their paper about potentially being able to manipulate people's emotions by adjusting the "mood" on their Facebook timelines.

Christian Rudder of OkCupid talks us through how using measurable testing on real users means a better experience for all users of OkCupid.

My take? It seems naive to believe that this kind of testing isn't happening on every service we visit. Maybe especially so on services where our attention is ostensibly the "product".

J.J. Hardy is one of the slickest fielding shortstops in the major leagues and his work around the bag on double plays is a leading reason why. Jonathan Schoop isn’t bad around the bag either and has a cannon for an arm to go with it. Put the two together and you have the best double play tandem in the MLB residing in Baltimore.

Hardy has been good the whole time he's been in Baltimore, but seeing him surrounded by good middle infielders, and good corners, and we've been getting to watch something special.